Will said:
They appear in Control Panel as a Flash Disk.
They were formatted in XP before I changed over to Win 7 and worked
fine under XP. They also work perfectly in my wife's laptop (Vista).
Re. suggestions that I should format the flash drives (again) as they
can't be seen in Windows explorer I am unable to do it. However,
other (larger) flash drives formatted in XP show up properly. I can
only think it may be something to do with the fact that the drives are
small at 500gb and Win 7 doesn't handle such small drives properly.
Clearly I could just throw them away and buy larger ones, but it is a
bit irritating.
Will
Microsoft doesn't seem to be unduly concerned by the size in this entry.
This is a 512MB flash key, in the compatibility list.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/co...pi=8&c=Storage Devices&sc=Flash/USB&os=32-bit
So that doesn't suggest the size is definitely a no-no.
I would expect Windows to survive quite nicely, dealing with things
as small as a 1.44MB floppy diskette. There is a file system suited
for everything. FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXFAT etc.
If it shows up in Disk Management, I presume that means as a raw storage
device, it is "visible" to the OS.
I would use the "dd" program, and do "dd --list" and check
that they're visible there. Generally, a device that is visible
in Disk Management, has a corresponding entry in "dd".
http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.5.zip
That leaves details at the file system level.
Flash drives can have an MBR sector, or not. You can prepare
them both ways. Windows doesn't seem to like more than one
partition on a flash drive, but other OSes support it. So
by default, Windows might even do an "MBR free" preparation
of the drive, with the file system starting right at sector 0.
Other OSes would have the first partition, offset from the origin.
If I prepare a flash key in Linux, I can put an MBR and primary
partition table on it, and define and format four primary partitions.
In Windows, only the first one mounts, and the other three are ignored.
You might use PTEDIT32 to see if there is an MBR present.
None of it should really matter. Windows 7 should be able
to mount a single raw file system. Or a partition table,
single file system (while ignoring any others). It all should
have worked.
It can be difficult to format a device, if it doesn't have a drive
letter. There's an alternative way to describe disks, but that
probably isn't available either at this point in time.
Even the Ridgecrop FAT32 formatter, probably needs a drive letter.
And without all of that, I'd just head on over to Linux,
use fdisk, define a partition table, then mkfs.vfat to
format the partition with FAT32 or other. Or mkfs.ntfs or
equivalent, for doing NTFS.
But if Windows doesn't accept an attempt to create a new partition
in Disk Management, and format it, it's a little harder to force it
to do so. The problem as I see it, is "naming" the raw device,
and hitting the exact one. If the format command won't accept
a "raw device name", there's no way to bootstrap yourself.
The "dd --list" program, shows raw names for storage devices.
Now, if we could get the "format" command to accept those ?
*******
Maybe you should try out "diskpart" ?
It takes a little getting used to, and for your first try, look
for a "recipe" that shows how to prep a disk. You need to know
which disk number the flash is showing up as, to work with it.
So your first diskpart commands, will be "listing things" to
confirm their identity. (You don't want to format the wrong disk.)
You select a disk, select a partition, before you can carry out
an operation on it. So rather then being one huge "command line operation",
the thing proceeds in bite sized steps.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465(v=WS.10).aspx
http://www.techrepublic.com/article...anagement-in-windows-xp-with-diskpart/5058719
In Start, you'd type "cmd" to open a command prompt. Right clicking
on the "cmd.exe" returned by the search in start, and selecting
"Run As Administrator", elevates the command prompt so it's powerful
enough to partition things. Some disk commands will fail, if they're
not elevated (like PTEDIT32 for example). Once the black command
prompt windows is open, you can run diskpart in there.
Good luck,
Paul
